​My wife and I watch so little TV that we might be liable to be exiled by a future national government as un-American. Of course, we hope that such a government will be soundly thumped in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. A landslide of that kind would do the heart and soul as well as the country good. So, getting to our viewing habits: First, most of it takes place on Rocky Mountain PBS. To be sure, even public television has in recent years supplemented its periodic fundraising drives with actual commercials. And viewing ads on commercial television is a major turnoff for us. Thanks to the legacy of the individual the Sesame Street characters referred to as Alistair Cookie Monster, we generally limit ourselves to shows on Masterpiece. Besides that, I’ve been watching the PBS News Hour from what seems like its very beginning, going back to MacNeil- Lehrer. Nowadays I generally limit myself to the 20-minute news summary, to leave psychological room for 50 minutes of Grantchester or All Creatures Great and Small...

​To date I have written and had published five books on practical wisdom. My favorite, which at number three falls exactly in the middle, is Wising Up—A Youth Guide to Good Living. Co-authored with M. Jan Rumi, it was published in 2007 by Cowley Publications, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. It is a collection of 80 one-page essays, each with an opening quotation, a good-living principle, and three optional journal or school exercises. Sample essay titles include Go for It!, Wait a Minute!, Stay the Course, Never Say Never, Don’t Boss Others Around, Choose Friends Wisely, Laugh, and Dance. Our final words to our readers are “Best wishes as you take your place in the world. By applying the principles in this book, you should be able to live a truly good life: one that fulfills your dreams while enriching those around you, including Mother Earth.” I am especially proud of the fact that my co-author and I represent all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as two diverse nations, the United States and Bangladesh...

Big-question time! So why are were here, living on Planet Earth? What’s it all about, Alfie? Beware of anyone who claims they really know. Any answer in the end is pure speculation. Still, it’s fun to speculate. So read along with me. Let’s see what we may see.
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As an educator, I’ve often thought of the Planet as a kind of school where we’re supposed to learn to become our biggest and best selves while helping the human race in whatever small ways to evolve into a peaceful, harmonious, mutually helpful family. It’s a John Deweyan form of education, where we learn by doing. Any mistake so long as it’s not fatal to ourselves or others can help us along the path. In this regard, I think the Hindu-Buddhist concept of reincarnation makes sense, since not many of us are likely to become fully noble human beings during one lifetime, unless, that is, we have filed down many rough spots in previous lives. In education this sort of “keep at it till you’ve got it” approach is known as mastery learning. It’s in line with the saying that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again...

If you want to score with a bestseller, write about your near-death experiences (NDE’s). Of course, you have to have some first and be a halfway decent writer. Along with UFO encounters, NDEs command near-universal interest and attention. After all, to quote Shakespeare, death is that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (Hamlet, III, I, 90-91) All travelogues will be highly esteemed...

This blog is a companion piece to the one titled “From Me-dom to WE-dom.” In fact, it discusses one of the major ways we can live in a “WE” versus a “me” mindset. So fasten your seatbelts for a minute or two, and here we go.

The term significant other,” or S.O. for short, is usually reserved for one’s partner or sweetie. Of course, for better or worse, the people who raise us and the list of other important people in our lives, from special teachers, coaches, ministers, relatives besides our parents, to close friends may also merit the term. My point here, however, is that we should consider everyone we encounter as at least potential S.O.s and relate to them accordingly. What’s the line? Many a time we have been visited by angels unaware. The story of how Abraham and Sarah showed hospitality to the three men who turned out in fact to be angels (Genesis 18:1-15) is illustrative here. A modern equivalent for us might be, treat your seatmate on an airplane with courtesy and respect, for you don’t know who he or she may turn out to be...

​The other title I thought of, given my hours of watching the now-concluded Paris Olympics, was “WE, WE, Monsieur!” In either case, in light of the Olympics’ modeling of friendly competition amongst sometimes hostile nations, a critical mass of humankind now needs to embrace a broader, more inclusive view of our global world. From my perspective, the most important race to be won is the human one. That’s why, in this age of self-definition through the use of personal pronouns, I have been giving mine as He-Him-WE, with the capitalization of “we” hinting at where I am going with this thought...

​It interests me that the word for vacation in a number of languages is plural. Take Portuguese, where it’s férias. The term is plural in the other Romance languages as well. Even Germany has a related plural term, die Ferien, although the other Romance languages have words that are cognates with our “vacation.” Take les vacances in French, le vacanze in Italian, and las vacaciones in Spanish. Do people who speak those languages simply take more vacations? The Malay language spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore (among other tongues), and parts of southern Thailand doesn’t always distinguish between singular and plural. Often you need to modify the noun in question with a number. Helpfully for us English speakers, the Malay term is vakansi...

​My wife and I live in Boulder, Colorado. The next town due south is called Superior. At least one thing justifies that name: It is the site of our nearest Costco. Result: We head there every month to stock up, mainly on stuff we need. Today as we drove home from our provisioning trip, we took a back road along the route of the Superior wildfire of several years ago, a year-end conflagration which burned down over 1,000 houses and other structures. We passed a modest unburned house. Its front lawn was adorned with smallish American flags, the kind kids would wave at holiday parades. Next to the driveway a TRUMP 2024 sign was proudly displayed. I thought about the people who lived there right next to our true-Blue community and in a solidly Democrat state with a married gay Jewish governor. Here’s what I might say to those folks...

​If you’d mentioned the term oxymoron to me back in 5th grade, I would have thought it a fancy way of saying “dumb ox,” a term of insult in frequent use back then by my fellow classmates and me. In the mid-60s, when I’d begun my college-teaching career, however, I would teach the term’s correct meaning to my English students with the then-popular anti-war example, “military intelligence.” Now, in 2024, the title of this blog can do that duty, illustrating as it does both choice and collaborative acceptance. Perhaps the most famous example of either/or is the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be.” I mean, the Prince of Denmark is contemplating suicide, to live or not to live. One can only be in one state or the other. The two are mutually exclusive. Yet even here there is a both/and possibility. For example, individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease are still physically alive and identifiable with the persons named in their passports or driver’s licenses. Yet the human beings they once were in personality and mental acuity are lost and gone forever. They are no longer the they everyone knew...

​So here’s the deal. Number 1, you’re too old. Number 2, you’re too old. And number 3 . . . Wait! I forget what Number 3 is. Joe, I hate to share it with you, especially as one of your long-time, die-heart supporters, but last night, June 27th, you proved to America and the world that you just don’t have it anymore. We were hoping for the fire of your State of the Union speech, but that’s not what we got. Your good days are now behind you. Time to go to Rehoboth Beach, kick back, and reflect on all your victories in a long and storied carrier as an elected official and public servant on the national stage. If you insist on going forward, Trump will have you for breakfast just as he had you for dinner last night. Despite all the rah-rah online support the official Democrat machine is offering about how you really gave it to the Donald, the reality is you did give it to him—the November election, that is. True, you did get a little better as the night wore on, still hoarse but your points were somewhat more understandable if not exactly harpoons to the heart of your opponent. For his part Trump offered his well-rehearsed Maga lines, two-thirds lies and one-third exaggerations. But—and here’s the point—in terms of energy and control, he seemed not four years younger but twenty-four: the oldest son arguing with a doddering grandpa of a father. It doesn’t matter if what he said was a jumble of ad-hominem barbs. Truth be told, you got in your share too, although given the low energy level of your voice, they sounded almost like compliments. It seemed a contest for who was the worst American President ever!

​My now-wife, Cedar Barstow, and I had been together a mere half year when we decided to use our federal Silver Sneakers benefit as elders to join the local YMCA for free. Apparently, some money-wise experts had found that seniors who exercise regularly were less likely to cost the Government money and therefore successfully advised Medicare to invest in free access to some 40,000 health clubs around the country for its members. Not only that, but we decided to attend a thrice-weekly hour-long program called Water Fitness. During the last 14 ½ years, its leadership has changed, but the exercises were always worthwhile and have really kept us both, now nearly 85 and 80, in good mental and physical health.

For at least a half dozen years, maybe more, my wife, Cedar, and I have been spending one or two days each year with seven to ten others at a mountain retreat located a forty-minute drive northwest from our house. For those of you who don’t know, we live in Boulder, Colorado, a smallish city that’s home to the main campus of the University of Colorado. Boulder has several other claims to fame, not least that it lies in a valley on the eastern doorstep of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a wonderful place to live. But this blog isn’t about the wonders of Boulder; instead, it concerns finding wonder 1,000 feet higher than our mile-high location at what the husband-and-wife owners, nature educators, call the Wild Heart Center for Nature & Psyche. So, on May 25, 2024, we left home at 9 a.m. to take part in an all-day program called “Rewilding Heart: Communing with the Living World.”

​Many of you reading this blog will know that about 30 years ago my wife, Dr. Cedar Barstow, started doing ethics training with individuals and groups. Her friend Amina mentioned to her back then that ethics is really just the right use of power. A light bulb went on for Cedar, so she started referring to her ethics training programs as teaching “the right use of power.” I came into Cedar’s life 15 years ago, and based on my work in the nonprofit community, I persuaded her to incorporate her program, and in 2013 it became a 501(c)3 federally tax-exempt organization. Now The Right Use of Power Institute, or RUPI, it is headed by the 44-year-old Dr. Amanda Aguilera who has diversified it into an international effort with some 500-plus teachers trained to help individuals and groups use their power with greater wisdom and skill, or, in Cedar’s terms, “to stand in their power while staying in their hearts.” Programs are currently available in Spanish as well as English. You can learn more about RUPI’s work at www.rightuseofpower.org. There are also two books on the subject: C. Barstow’s Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics (2nd ed., 2015) and Barstow and Feldman, Living in the Power Zone: How Right Use of Power Can Transform Your Relationships (2013). Both are available from Amazon or at the RUPI website. Initially and in both books, four kinds of power are discussed: personal, role, collective, and status. In the last few years two additional types have been added: systemic and universal power. This week’s blog will deal with Collective Power...

​I have four virtual hiking poles for this pilgrimage: People, places, religions, and languages. Let’s begin with people—those heaven-sent witnesses who showed me that the Other was not to be feared but to be learned from and embraced as fellow members of the human family. The first was Florine, our African-American housekeeper who came when I was 1 ½ and stayed till I graduated from high school. She was black, working-class, religious, and Christian. We were white, middle-class, secular, and Jewish. Even as a toddler, however, I understood that, different as she was, she was the strongest, most loving person in the house. The next was Al Watson, my boarding-school English teacher. Al was my equivalent of the charismatic teacher played by Robin Williams in the film “The Dead Poets’ Society.”..

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog about following the yellow directional arrows (flechas amarillas in Spanish) that help one stay on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage way that leads to the Cathedral of Saint James (“Santiago” in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela, a regional capital in northwestern Spain. Today, however, the pilgrimage I refer to is less religious and more the stuff of popular culture, as you’ll see in a moment...

​In English this French expression generally refers to an individual who knows her or mainly his way around town, that is, someone who is a suave or debonaire type (three other French terms). The literal meaning of the phrase is simply “to know [what] to do.” A related English saying is “Knowledge is power.” Let’s consider a few examples that illustrate both these expressions...

​Mark Twain is quoted as saying about Britain and America, “[They are] two countries separated by a common language.” Well, for the most part we can understand each other, especially when British regional dialects are not involved. But it’s also true that, pronunciation aside, we have different words between us for the same ideas or things. Now this phenomenon is common when a language leaves its mother country with a body of immigrants and develops separately in the new area over time. For one thing, the transplanted version tends to be more conservative in the sense of holding on to older words, pronunciations, or locutions vis a vis usage in the old country...

I decided to move to Colorado in late spring of 2009, some two-and-a-half years after my wife of 43 years had died in Hawaii. Having discerned that a late-life career as a Catholic monk was not for me, I had met a woman in Boulder, Colorado, home to the state’s premier public-university campus, and found myself falling in love with both her and the city of Boulder. Now a 15-year resident of the city and state, I want to share some of my impressions. First, though, a little history, compliments of Wikipedia.

In 1864 Robert Browning published the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra. It starts like this: “Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made. . . .” The French pharmacist-psychologist-hypnotist Émile Coué (1857-1926) created a self-improvement affirmation, the English version of which goes, “Every day and [in] every way I’m getting better and better.” Optimism and the idea of progress are clearly twins. Yet another 19th-century author, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was more of a realist. He opened his A Tale of Two Cities (1859) with this famous statement: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair….” Which version appeals to you?

Unless you’re talking about chaired professors at prestigious universities, teachers, including professors, don’t make much money. With two daughters headed for college, I went over to what faculty consider the Dark Side to become a dean and, eventually, an academic vice-president. College administrators as a rule do better than their teaching colleagues. Moreover, the former generally have funds to attend relevant workshops and conferences, often in appealing places. So, from my administrator days I learned that when you go to such meetings, they are really in two parts—the conference and the para-conference. The conference is what’s on the program. But the para-conference, which happens on the periphery, is generally the more exciting and even more educational part...

The German poet Goethe put it this way, “Zwei Seelen leben, ach!, in meiner Brust!” Or in English, “Two souls live, alas, in my breast!” Danny Kaye, in a comic vein, voiced a related idea: “She was beside herself—her favorite position!” Today’s theme is more Goethe than Kaye and, in its implications for living a good life, serious rather than comic...

​Given the Holocaust, several of the ironies of the 20th century are the fact that most of world Jewry, 80%, are Ashkenazim, or German Jews. That’s what the Hebrew word means, “Germans.” Another irony is that 85% of the vocabulary of their language, Yiddish, are German cognates. My Ashkenazi parents, for example, would always gossip in Yiddish to keep the juicy tidbits from my sister and me—that is, until I learned enough German to understand. But by then, I was already away at college and Natalie was married and living in Argentina. So it no longer mattered.

​A few years ago I wrote a series of blogs on close encounters with famous people. As with my dad, these unexpected meetings would just keep happening to me. I also wrote about encounters, even if not close or of the third kind, with what used to be called UFOs. But that’s a matter for another day. One of my favorite of the former encounters was with Henry Winkler, AKA The Fonz, during my first-class flying days. Already the head of his own production company, he was busy reading a script and struck me as very serious. When mealtime came, however, he loosened up. So I wished him good appetite. With a gesture right out of Happy Days, he moved his thumb toward me and said, “Back atcha, Feldman!” Then I knew: The Fonz was alive and well!

​I think I was close to 80 when I was first asked what my pronoun was. Huh?! How about “I”? No, the asker wanted a third-person pronoun, singular or plural, and possibly a mixture of the two. Okay, so I needed to talk about myself as a third person? How about in the second person? For me, you’re a You, and for you I’m a You too. Cool! 

​I don’t know how I got into thinking and writing about wisdom. I guess it all began with my desire as a youth to become the best person I could be, and that most likely manifested itself as a lifelong pilgrimage to wisdom. Even as a college literature teacher, I found my favorite job was being a student advisor, which generally meant trying to get to know each student’s talents and inclinations and helping them manifest the former and grow into the latter. In any case, I ended up writing or co-writing five books on the topic of popular wisdom. You can learn about them at my website, www.reynoldruslan.com, and most are still available at amazon.com. So today I plan to do something a bit different, namely, to share a selection of proverbs from the thousand in my first book on the subject, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom, co-authored with Cynthia Voelke and published by Harper-Collins in 1992. Enjoy!